It generally doesn’t take much to make me happy – time with my family, a good book, a home-cooked meal and a clean house.

What makes me deliriously happy is when hands other than my own accomplish those last two, but I digress…

This Memorial Day holiday, the girls were with their dad and I was left to my own devices, so I decided to begin my day doing the one thing I wanted to do – nothing.

You know the kind of “nothing” I’m talking about, the kind where you wallow around on the couch, watching television and when you get up you’re achy and tired.

It was during my pursuit of the most perfect holiday, I discovered two things – one, I now have a new-found love of Cool Whip; and two, that A&E show “Hoarders” is fantastic, creepy, nasty and morbidly fantastic.

My first discovery came about a bit like my recently discovered love of tomatoes. Someone once told me the red juicy fruit doesn’t come off the vine with salt and pepper on it.

Apply that logic to Cool Whip, and you realize that God didn’t put it on the store shelf with pineapple or strawberries in it.

Wow – talk about a fantastical taste. I have just got to get my hands on some kind of recipe that will instruct me on how to make that masterpiece dessert found rarely on the Tabby D’s dessert cart or that cake-like creation found at the recently departed Off the Square Café.

As for my second discovery, it involves television – specifically my ability to watch what I wanted to watch, when I wanted to watch it. I should put it out up front that I don’t get to watch a lot of television in my house. We have three, televisions that is, but I also have three children, which leaves me one TV short.

So this past Monday, while flipping the channels, I came across what appeared to be a marathon of the show that gives a fascinating look into the lives of two people whose inability to part with things is so out of control that they are on the verge of some kind of personal crisis.

Cases in point: Shirley and her cats and Jake and his stuff.

Shirley and her husband live in Texas and had become the town dumping ground for stray animals, specifically cats – and I mean an ungodly number of cats.

Added on top of that were the piles of trash, trash and more trash. It was so bad that animal control was called in and found something like 57 dead cats inside the home.

In Jake’s case, he couldn’t throw away anything – and I mean anything. My nose is wrinkling thinking about the images on the screen. He had a dog and wouldn’t throw away the excess dog hair because he thought it would shorten his animal’s life. Strange, I know.

The whole hour-long episode was kind of like watching an accident scene on the interstate. You want to look away; you know you should look away, but instead your eyes are glued, riveted even, waiting to see what’s underneath the next box.

If I could have read a book while watching the commercial breaks and enjoyed some Cool Whippy delight, it would have been the best morning ever. Still, it ranks right up there.